[thumbuddy]

I agree with you. I would argue that most if not all team dysfunction arises during reviews. Ive worked on places where senior engineers will allow bugs like you've mentioned through to production so they can catch the "hard off by one problem" to get the + and stick the - on someone else. Even serious bugs. Yep leads protecting themselves from ambitious seniors and seniors protecting themselves from juniors who shouldn't be juniors. Vindictive practices, gas lighting non-technical management, etc.

So with any decent system, the weakest link is the people using it. If you have adversarial people on your team, and in my experience, you probably do, sometimes the system surrounding code review is far more important. IE reviewers share the blame(better yet there is no blame shit just gets fixed), and hard rules around being an asshole need to be enforced.

I realize you are describing a healthy work environment. Unfortunately, I've yet to find one. I almost made one once, but a wave of clandestine hires destroyed it and it was time to move on. Pissed off the wrong narcissist...